Electric History

The Electric VLSI Design System was originally written in 1982
by Steven M. Rubin at the Fairchild A.I. Laboratory in Palo Alto, California.

The first published paper appeared in 1983
[Rubin, Steven M., "An Integrated Aid for Top-Down Electrical Design,"
VLSI '83 (Anceau and Aas, eds), North Holland, Amsterdam, 63-72, August 1983.]

Since its creation, Electric was made available to universities in source-code form.
Within five years, it was in use at hundreds of schools around the world.

For a time in the mid 80s, Electric was released commercially by Applicon under the name "Bravo3VLSI."

In 1988, Electric Editor Incorporated was founded and sold the system commercially.
The company released the Electric source code to the
Free Software Foundation in 1998.

In 2000, Electric Editor Incorporated closed shop and sold Electric to Steven Rubin,
who created Static Free Software, a company that manages the free distribution of Electric.

In September, 2003 the "C" version of Electric was abandoned, and a translation was begun to the Java language.
The work was completed in June, 2005. Although the C code is still available, it is no longer developed or supported.

In 2004, Static Free Software became a division of RuLabinsky Enterprises, Incorporated.
The new corporation continues its dedication to free software.